$ cursor 12 40

Now imagine that the cursor is sitting in the middle of the screen. cursor is quite fast, but there is a much faster way. Set a shell variable like L22 to move to the 22nd line like this:

$ L22=`cursor 23 0`

Then,

$ echo "$L22$MESSAGE\ec"

The double quotes surround the messages in case they contain special characters. The \ec tells echo not to print a carriage return. Some versions of UNIX use the -n switch instead of \ec:

$ echo -n "$L22$MESSAGE"

(The prompt command, which figures out which flavor of newline suppression your echo command uses, can be substituted for echo.)